When you argue with reality, reality always wins.
The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond – awake and present, here and now already.
To be intimate is to feel the silence, the space that everything is happening in.
Those who are free don’t want anything. They don’t want anything from their mind, they don’t want anything from their emotions, they don’t want anything from anyone, and they don’t want anything from life. They don’t want anything. If you don’t want, all that’s left is an incredible sense of being free.
Silence reveals itself only to itself. Only when we enter as nothing and stay as nothing, will silence open its secret.
Again, the only way to know that we’ve seen into the true nature of something is that the story we’re telling ourselves releases.
Ego is nothing more than the beliefs, ideas, and images we have about ourselves – and so it is actually.
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not the same as truth or wisdom, and certainly not the same as direct experience.
Jesus is saying, “Come, come into the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven exists on the face of the earth, and men and women do not understand it.
Religion’s primary function is to awaken within us the experience of the sublime and to connect us with the mystery of existence.
There’s only one guarantee that Jesus gave: if you can receive and awaken and embody what he is speaking about, then your life will never be the same again. Then you will realize that you’re already living in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Imagine if you took it on in yourself to reorient your life trajectory toward your divinity. Your divinity: I so loved the world, that I gave it all of myself. Imagine your birth as an act of pouring yourself forth into life as a loving means of redemption. Imagine your human life as what you have come to redeem. And when you’ve fully awakened to all of it, then you’ve fully redeemed your human incarnation.
Meditation is neither a means to an end nor something to perfect. Meditation done correctly is an expression of Reality, not a path to it. Meditation done incorrectly is a perfect mirror of how you are resisting the present moment, judging it, or attaching to it.
The changeless is what knows the change, the changeless is unconditioned.
The primary task of any good spiritual teaching is not to answer your questions, but to question your answers.
Aspiration is not so much a matter of the mind as of the heart, in that it is a reflection of what you cherish, love, and value most. You do not need to be reminded of what you truly love, only of what you do not love. And what you actually love is most truly reflected in your actions, not in what you feel, think, or say.
Meditation is like an oven that forces the truth out.
Myth isn’t about factual or historical truth, but about a deeper truth. In ancient times, people saw myth in a very different light – as a vehicle that can transmit and carry a subtlety and richness of experience that simply cannot be conveyed by linear, conceptual forms of language.
When these Velcro thoughts and emotions arise, the key is to face and investigate whatever belief structures underlie them. In that moment, inquiry is your spiritual practice. To avoid this practice is to avoid your own awakening. Anything you avoid in life will come back, over and over again, until you’re willing to face it – to look deeply into its true nature.
Awakeness is not moving back from, trying to explain, trying to fix, or get rid of. Awakeness, when it’s allowed to be experienced, is a deep love and caring for what is. Love is always throwing itself into the moment, here and now, fully abandoning itself into now. To be in relationship in this way is simple. It is humble. It is very intimate. Then you can meet another person in a whole different way.